Altruism 101

 As a new member of the Vogel Alcove Auxiliary Board (which supports the Vogel Alcove, a daycare center for homeless children), I am the chair for Story Time: each Tuesday morning, a volunteer arrives at the Alcove and reads books to several groups of children.  

The first day of the program in September, I wasn't sure what I was in for.  I have to admit I was a little nervous and felt a bit ridiculous: being a theatre major, I arrived, of course, in full costume, dressed as "mama" bear (wearing a hat that has a bear head complete with teeth--I'm not clear on why my family owns this), toting "papa bear" (aka "Bubba Bear", borrowed from Jack) who is almost as big as I am, and a book about a family of bears who work together to make the first birthday special for baby bear.  

Each group came in—some shy, some bubbly, many happy, a couple crabby, a few mischievous.  They took their place on the carpet, sat crisscross applesauce, anticipating.  Some of the groups had nametags, and the children consistently delighted in being called by name.  They wanted to know my name, too. I read the story. (Yes, I used character voices; yes, it made them laugh).  At the end, when they figured out that it was baby bear's birthday, their eyes grew big. They liked to answer questions ("Which bear made the bread?"  "Grandpa Bear!!").  As each group left, they were uniformly entranced by my hat--some afraid to touch, others standing nearby until they got a close up. Several awarded me hugs.  One quiet little boy tugged on my sleeve, and said, "I love you".  

I arrived at the Vogel Alcove about 9:15, and I left at 10:45.  Walking to my car, all I could think was what better way could I have spent the last hour and a half?  Why haven’t I done that before?  It was easy; it was fun; it didn’t cost me anything.

In fact, these kids gave me something rare—a moment of silence to remember all I have.  On the drive home, I also felt sad, a little humbled.  Because these children who have suffered unimaginable losses require so little, light up just by hearing their name, listening to a story, and knowing someone cares about them.  You would think with all that has happened in their little lives' so far, they would withdraw, but it is largely the opposite.  They are open, in the beautiful way that kids are, waiting to be filled. All it takes is showing up. NO COSTUME/THEATER TRAINING/CHARACTER VOICES REQUIRED!! 

The only difference between these children and my own is luck.

So if you actually live in Dallas, here is what I ask of you:

1.) Visit the website and learn more about the Alcove.vogelalcove.org 

2.) Learn about the Auxiliary and the good work we are doing supporting the Vogel Alcove.  Please consider joining for a $100 annual donation ($150 for couples).  The membership form can be found at http://www.vogelalcove.org/auxiliary.html

3.)Go to http://www.volunteerspot.com/login/entry/652345638618250068 to sign up for Storytime.  

It is INCREDIBLY EASY!!  A CALENDAR IS RIGHT THERE, SHOWS YOU AVAILABLE DATES, AND ALL YOU DO IS SIGN UP.  There are also other fantastic programs, like Birthday Buddies (bringing presents/cake on children's birthdays) and MOMS (an acronym for Moms Supporting Other Moms, which pairs a volunteer with a parent transitioning out of the program).

Please call or email me with any questions, big and small.  Click on the link above and join now, and please let me know when you have done it!  Forward this to anyone you know who could use a little feel good in their life by serving these most deserving young people.

A LITTLE ALCOVE INFO:  Vogel Alcove serves a broad segment of the homeless population in Dallas by providing ree childcare and preschool for young children living in local homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and transitional housing program.  In a nurturing environment, the Alcove welcomes 115 homeless children, six weeks to five-years old, without regard to race, ethnicity, or religion.  Licensed by the State of Texas, the center operates year-round, Monday - Friday from 7am-6pm.  Without reliable and accessible free childcare, homeless parents with young children would be unable to seek or continue employment, complete an education, or attain permanent housing.

Why haven't I written on my blog in so long, you may ask?  (Or you could have been embroiled in any number of completely unrelated tasks, and the question never crossed your mind, not even half of once).  I can no longer blame summer, nor the beginning of school, the new school year, or even a new calendar year, because none apply, yet still my blog sits idly by, "Write on me, inconsistent owner!  Perfectionistic self-important blowhard!!  Write!!"  One of the best pieces of advice I have ever heard regarding writing was during a conference some years ago when a published somebody described, when asked, his "process" as this: ASS IN CHAIR.  So there you go.


Still life gets in the way.  And instead of just writing about life, which is sort of the point, and the only thing you can do anyway, I think I need to wait for an important epiphany or something noteworthy or catchy or adverbially profound-ish and then I'm doubting my  identity and it's been months.  And I whine to myself, "I haven't written in so long, what's the point..." and the inertia washes over and I feel, as Billy Crystal said in When Harry Met Sally, I'm option C. trapped under something heavy.  A strange ADD version of perfectionism.  So that's reason one.  


It's not that nothing worthy to be written and/or mulled over has happened in the last several months.  Quite the opposite.  My son has started a new private school, a big switch from our public school before, a decision over which I angsted ad naseum.  My daughter, physically delayed, now toddles across entire rooms, routinely yodeling "blue" "purple" "oh!" , "Hi!", "Yes!" and "Mama! Mama! Mama!"  She makes the most singularly perfect pig noise in existence.  She will howl like a wolf.  She likes to whisper, "Ssshhhhh!" with a very serious expression.  My husband and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary.  I re-did our bedroom.  I avoided, plague-like, my novel, which screams to be finished already.  I attended an awesome conference in Houston: I started writing on my novel again.


I have had many questions/emotions/ flood me as my son embarks on a totally different academic/social journey.  But I have stopped short of writing about it: the hope, fear, thrill that comes with watching my child go through an enormous transition.  Because "watch" is the key.  I cannot do it for him.  (The older my children get, I realize what I thought I had control over and what I actually have control over and the answer is squat.) So much to write about.  Too much.  


But still, I find myself befuddled over this blog thing.  What is mine to write about?  It's happening in my son's life, right?--does this grant ownership?  He's a minor.  No one wants to think they are using their children for literary fodder.  But I go back and forth back and as of yet have not landed on what is fitting (or not) to include in my musings when it involves other people, particularly my family.  It's not like this is fiction and I'm creating ingenious varied profiles.  These are my real life characters.  


Being sturdily American, I also loathe the suggestion that I am egocentric (presumably because I am so egocentric).  I am sensitive to the questions that some writer and some not writer friends  have posed to me about publishing what is considered "memoir".  It's said like a dirty word, like "lice"--"memoir"!  "Isn't that like publishing your diary?"  "I could never do that."  One person suggested writing about your children without their "consent" (which can only be given when they are old enough to understand what they are actually consenting to) would be "whoring" her children.  Ouch.  So that's reason two.


To recap, not only am I a lazy procrastinator, I'm also conflicted.


But I've been doing my own private research to address this conundrum because I care about it.  I have come to a preliminary conclusion that, like most things, there is not one right true answer.  But there's probably a fairly clear answer for me, in the particulars of my situation.


For me, the following quote from writer Dani Shapiro (a supreme writer and memoirist whom I had the pleasure of studying with in Positano back in 2007) clarifies some of what is murky:

    "One can't write with abandon if one is worrying about the consequences.  And to have children is to always, always worry about the consequences. From the time my son was an infant, I became aware that he hadn’t asked for a mother who is a writer. Up until then, the people in my life — parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, friends — had felt like fair game. If I was going to be hardest on myself, then, well, they were grown-ups; they could handle it. But if I was going to write about my son, I was going to have to be very, very careful. And as any writer will tell you, careful has no place in making art. My atavistic desire to protect my child (against myself!) was at odds with my creative desire to write from an internal landscape that now included him, one which had been forever altered by his birth.Every memoirist makes her own set of rules to write and to live by, and in these 12 years, the strictest rule to which I have adhered has been this: Before I have written anything about my son, I have asked myself whether I could imagine him turning to me some day, and saying, I wish you hadn’t told that story about me. But of course the boy I know today has not yet grown into the man he will someday become. Right now, he likes the fact that he sometimes appears in my work. He has read my most recent memoir, “Devotion,” though in truth I think he’s skimmed it for his own name. He thinks it’s cool when I mention him in an interview. (He would enjoy being written about in this essay, though I have no intention of showing it to him.) But he may not always feel this way, and so I can’t possibly know; all I can do is try to protect his privacy while not censoring myself to the point of muteness. Certainly I can imagine him saying, I wish you hadn’t told that story about yourself. But as a writer, my inner life is my only instrument. I understand the world only by my attempts to shape my experience on the page. Then, and only then, do I know what I think, feel, believe. Without these attempts (the word essay derives from “attempt”) I am lost."--Dani Shapiro

Joan Didion puts another spin on it: 

 "In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating but theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.

 All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?"--Joan Didion

Aren't they good?!  I'm still working this out obviously. Part of the truth for me right now is, my kids and family remain my truest deepest wellspring of inspiration and a simultaneous gray area.  A Catch-22 in action.  So at present, instead of avoiding my blog for fear of selling out my family, I will tread lightly, slapping it together gently piecemeal as I go.  What I've come to know for sure is this: the very act of writing through something often reveals it to me.  Taking what is chaotic and structuring it into story helps me understand its meaning, like working backwards, not understanding the "theme" or the "lesson" to the story until I'm finished writing it.  I don't write it to ellucidate the meaning--I write it to find it.  Maybe I am a narcissistic reality TV fool hiding behind the cultured veil of the tag 'literary'.  But even if that's true, my silent friends--I know you are out there, I can hear you breathing--I cannot be like some Pixar Andrew Stanton created Wall-E.  I am not on this cold trash techno planet alone.  Climb aboard, comrades.  I offer no answers,  just a buoyant ride.  

Writing.  I like it.  As Gloria Steinem once put it, "Writing is the only thing, that when I'm doing it, I don't feel like I should be doing something else." Keyboard as voice, virtual arm, pat on the back, encouragement in what is almost always an uncertain time.  Connection.  At least the attempt at one.  We don't get grades out of grade school, but what would your grade be for being IN IT be right now, do you think?  Are you standing on the outside?  Or do you understand that the notion of safety, taken to extremes, is more deadly, quietly epidemic, than any virus?  To put it in Wall-E speak--are you willing to utter "EEEEEEVVVVVAAAAAAAA!!" without worrying how stupid you might sound?  I am.  Today I believe that is all there is.

SUMMER VACATION ON THE CHEAP

You know, like I said.  Summer.  HOT.  Hard to write.  Even with one less kid around.  (What's my excuse?  A viscous stomach bug, lasting five full days.  Mad Men season three.)

Jack spent last week with Nammaw and Gramps in Paladuro, Texas (yeah, I don't really know where that is either).  They saw a part Texas History/part techno show with "special effects, mom!", swam everyday in the motel pool Jack chose specifically because well, it had a pool (Best Western plug here), rode horses on what was supposedly the easy trail but raised my poor mother's blood pressure (their horses were named Jethro, Tonto, and Festus; can you literally think of anything better?  In the nightly phone call, Jack reported he chose Tonto but switched to Jethro at the last minute, a fateful decision because out on the actual trail, Jethro was "nice" and "fun" and "galloped" up the hill, causing Jack to scream with laughter, but Tonto was "beautiful but stubborn".  You know what they say.  An animal is supposed to project his master's personality.  So of course my mother was atop Tonto, who enjoyed stopping and standing randomly no matter what Nammaw did, until the guide had to come and drag them.  This image gives me no end to pleasure.  Am I just pure evil?), and ate dinner twice at a joint named "Buffalo's" where Jack insists he had rattlesnake tacos.  (God how I adore a good parentheses.)

We didn't go on an official family vacation this year.  My stepson Zachary just got back from Michigan, where he resided for seven weeks, at debate camp, which yes, he went to voluntarily (is it weird the things there are camps for now?  debate camp, chess camp, cooking camp, study skills camp, belly button picking camp; my summers were spent riding my bike back and forth between friends' houses, leaving at nine and returning at five, as if I was working a full-time job).  My husband and Isabel and I are hung out together all week. "Da da" arrived home, we had dinner and gave Izzy her bath, all the while showering her with exclusive attention, which the girl clearly revels in (she is her mother's daughter, already flirting coquettishly with older men, performing with myriad voices).  Even though we were alternately sick, it reminded me of what it was like when Jack was little and I only had one kid at home to focus on and then that made me wonder why I ever thought that was so hard.   What was he doing?  Like smiling, gurgling, rolling around on the floor, eating occasionally?  It seemed so earth shattering at the time.

Last week was my first real consistent time alone with my daughter since I brought her home from the hospital.  I feel like we've gotten to know each other better.  Yep, she really does like to talk excessively, bite things fiercely, turn her head to the side and raise her eyebrows because she knows the coos of affection she will elicit.  And me?  Well, I'm the same mom now as I was to Jack, but also some other lady who doesn't freak out over diaper rash.  The same mommy who consistently forgets key items in the diaper bag, like say, diapers (I actually fashioned a diaper out of an enormous maxi-pad once when Jack was 8 weeks old, with the aid of this very hospitable guy in the baby chiropractor's office.  baby chiropractor's office? need I say more?) only now it's not such a crisis.

Remember you were a kid and a summer took forever?  Yes, I know, a logical mathematical friend suggested to me this is not so strange, because it's relative.  The less years you have, the longer everything seems.  Then my friend smiled and said, "You're forty." But go with me a second, no matter how embarrassing your clothes were.  Remember how you wanted to go back to school by the time you got there? Maybe you whined and kicked, but you secretly coveted your crisp new clothes that weren't too short or too stained yet, craved your Hello Kitty or SuperMan lunchbox, missed your friends with fresh haircuts and crooked teeth growing in, your different teacher who was of course taller/shorter/fatter/slimmer/nicer/meaner/younger/older and had new golden rules that you had to learn and live by.  The same just waxed floors, same cafeteria and principal, reminding you who you were, who you were growing into, how you had changed and how you had stayed the same.  It was comforting, wasn't it? 

I felt the last fews days I was in some past home movie, watching myself go through the paces I have been before--that fantastic montage of those years that everyone tells you--strangers tell you--will go too fast, in a blink, over before you know it. And you smile and nod, clutching your baby who just had a blowout, or spilled her cup of milk into the crevices of her carseat.  And you try to be Eckhart Tolle about it and focus on the Power of Now.  But you have to make dinner.  And you're out of milk, eggs, fabric softener and toilet paper. Meanwhile, my sixteen-year-old stepson is taller than my husband, definitely more mature than I am, beginning to live a life we are less a part of.  And that's the way it should be.  But the thing is, we were just getting married, he was just six, I just saw him, because I am not this old.  That's my parents.  

Jack returned late Sunday night, thankfully without Jethro in tow, and alas, in a few short weeks, second grade will begin.  We will stop broiling from the inside out, and eventually be cold enough in the fall to forget how sweaty we are now.  It just keeps spinning regardless, proving what is just today will later be some memory from a vantage point we can't imagine.  This makes me feel big and small.  I want to freeze everything, encapsulate my children in a way that Shutterfly or Snapfish cannot contain.  Time keeps giving me the finger.

I'm glad we didn't go on a big family vacation with plane trips and magnetic tic tac toe boards and hotels and restaurants.  It was nice kicking it old school.  Staying at home for awhile.  I keep convincing myself I will remember forever.  That somehow that would be enough.

TOO HOT to write.

This writing consistently thing is challenging for me.  Especially now in summer, with both adorable wonderful time-consuming children expecting food and general care-taking 24/7. Summer in Texas. It's hot, friends.  Those of you who know me from high school know this all too well.  I often thank God Houston was the first place I lived, instead of say, the third, because had it been a domicile later in life, I would have understood the ARMPIT I was in.  Instead, it was a blissfully innocent if moist first eighteen years.  Houston: where every day is a bad hair day.  Were they being honest, this slogan would appear on brochures boasting city information.

Not to knock Houston generally--it has some fantastic culture, theater, restaurants, that Fast Times teenage club teeming underage squalor where I watched (sweaty, of course, and envious) all the girls with boyfriends dance to "Sister Christian"--but all I'm saying is, be prepared to sweat. Be prepared to shower and blow dry and get ready and put on makeup and to have it literally drip from your face like some colorful experiment.  Some Mary Kay nightmare. To have your hair suck up the steamy air and quietly devastatingly EXPAND (please refer to my high school graduation picture below for vivid proof, where my hair literally sticks out past the frame of the camera).

And while Dallas isn't Houston, and as an adult, I live in Dallas, where it isn't quite so humid, it is it's own brand of boiling.  It makes me believe in global warming.  It's not science, I don't get the science, it's just common sense.  It's hot as hell.  Is it startlingly more balmy or am I just getting older?  Is it really helping at this point to wear sunscreen?  I drench my tender-skinned children in Banana Boat.  I try in vain to protect them.  Still Jack returned from the pool the other day pink as fresh meat.  He already has freckles sprinkling across the bridge of his nose.  He's only seven.

And two Saturdays ago, while Isabel was no more than two feet away from me, she fell and bumped her lily-white face against a drawer, and we spent the next several hours in the emergency room getting stitches.  It did not help that the plastics doctor we requested, while clearly skilled at his job, showed an hour and a half late and had the bedside manner of Nurse Ratched (whom I played in high school, and can say with authority this guy resembled).  I tearfully asked, "Will it leave a scar?"  And he didn't bother to hide a snort.  "It's a cut.  All cuts leave scars.  I don't have a magic wand."  Patronizing doesn't really begin to cover it.  

My husband, normally the grounded reasonable one (like who is not that compared to me?) looked like he might vault the bed and throttle him.  Sorry we ruined your dinner plans, doc, I was too stunned to say, but this is my tiny beautiful girl; what if it is my fault that she has a scar on her face forever?  Later I would think ad naseum about this reaction, knowing in my gut, I would have felt less devastated if she had been a boy.  The insidious nature of the need for a female to be attractive in this world has such a hold on me, it caught me naked, before I could put on my stylish yet natural battle gear.  I like to think I'm not part of this inane Juicy Couture culture, that I am somehow beyond the airbrushed madness.  And then I see myself sometimes, frightening close to a version of womanhood I am disgusted by.  And I realize all over again why I was apprehensive to have a girl, that being mother to a her is inherently different, in too many ways to imagine.

But it wasn't just that she's a girl.  When our children get hurt, we feel responsible.  She was physically so close, yet I still couldn't do anything to stop it. Accidents happen and it doesn't have to be anyone's fault.  This past week a family was riding in their car to Beaver Creek and got in an accident; a 5-year-old son was the only survivor.  Is five, I keep wondering, old enough to remember?  Yet we just troll the streets and go to Central Market and watch Mad Men and brush our teeth and act like the possibilities aren't possibilities.  Because what else can we do?  We live in a world where planes run into buildings.  But we still have to get to work.  Being constantly aware of the fragility doesn't do much but cause mental paralysis.  

So we adapt to the heat.  Sweat it off.  Take a shower.  Remember.  Laugh at The Bachelor.  Feel sorry for Lindsay Lohan.  Live, us all, in our existential Texas.  Instead of trying in vain to hide them, maybe we embrace them sometimes, our scars.  Maybe that's what makes us beautiful.

 HOT OR WHAT? 

(certainly liberating)

Look at the halo surrounding.  So large was my hair, it had its very own aura.

Conan O'Brien, commencement genius. Mike Rawlings, Dallas mayor. Are things looking up in education?

Conan O'Brien delivered the commencement address at Dartmouth on June 12.  If you haven't treated yourself to the whole enchilada (full, 24-minute-long, video is posted here) or at least a little genius sampler (a 4-minute-long video of the highlights), I suggest you make your own day by doing so immediately.

Some of the quotes I enjoyed include:

"Whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity; and with clarity comes conviction and true originality."

He unflinchingly accounts his rise to his "dream job" and what the job actually turned out to be for him.

'There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized.'

His hilarity runs all the way through, but you have to believe, watching him don that silly graduation hat and Jimmy Neutron hair, even the people we think of as uber 'successful' have their own heap of failures and disappointments.  It's cliche because it's true: it isn't what happens but how we react that eventually determines where we land.  This is the lesson I want to impart to my children. The lesson I want to be true. The lesson it took until my thirties to begin to grasp.  O'Brien also noted, to my great relief, and I'm paraphrasing here--success (or not) at a career does not define you.  That I desperately want to believe.  But honestly it's my Achille's heel.  What constitutes success, after all?  Starring on Broadway?  Publishing a New York Times bestseller?  What was all that expensive 'education' for?

I got my MFA in acting, spent over a decade involved heavily with the theater, all through high school, college, graduate school, and four years in L.A., but ultimately, for reasons too long and tangential for this post, I went a different direction.  But I will say it was not without a lot of trying, many a retarded commercial audition, and a lot of heartache and tears.  I have to admit, there are still times I ask myself "am I a quitter?".  At my twenty-year high school reunion a couple of years ago, friends and frankly many people I have no recollection of every roaming the halls with kept ambling up and chirping versions of, "I thought you would be in New York!" and "I always thought you'd be a famous actress!"  I smiled and tried not to disappear into my over-sweet too liquored punch and willed the topic to die.  You know, it's just so NOT "Go for the gold, Ponyboy!"  There's no movie about the guy (or girl) who makes the sensible decision to put his original dream away for one that seems more doable.  I watch "The Rookie" or "Rocky", one of those feel good movies about the old guy (or girl) going back for the brass ring and making it dammit, with that extra stick-to-itiveness, that won't-take-no-for-an-answer, and yep, I  feel a twinge of regret.  

But often my son is watching beside me, and his face is perfect in the screen light.  And my daughter slides her carefree arm across the tray of her highchair, crust and bananas and rice and vegetables free falling, while looking me in the eye and grinning mischievously.  My husband says something so uniquely him, so whip smart funny, that I remember.  This reality is not a dream.  It's not perfect.  It is real.
  
Sometimes I wonder if I had "made it"--if my original dream of becoming a successful actress in L.A. or New York had happened--would I have looked at the life I have now--gorgeous children, loving husband, anonymity even--and imagined the grass greener?  Or would I rise in my profession, and the dream turned out to be something other than I imagined it would be?  Maybe I would have felt like Conan O'Brien when NBC blew up: "There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized."  I have to be content with knowing I will never know.  By virtue of taking one course we are saying no to another.

Of course it doesn't have to be black and white: this past Saturday afternoon, for example, I acted in a reading, performed with scripts in hand (ironically cast as a principal, the play set in a public high school), at Kitchen Dog Theater.  We only had one rehearsal and I felt a little rusty those first few lines, suddenly throat dry nervous in the knowledge that an audience was watching me.  But then something clicked; I remembered to look at the actor I was talking to, focus on the words, make it about what was happening between us instead of what was up with me.  And it was so fun!  I love the play, and I loved playing actor for a few hours, before I went home to my family. 

So what the hell does this have to do with Conan O'Brien or the commencement speech that should be required listening?  That we all of us have those ships that didn't sail and that star that did not appear.  We can either spend our time looking back wishing or we can look at what is in front of us, accept it for what it is, and get on with it.  We can make it up from here however we want to.  I'm not saying I'm always successful at this endeavor, but I'm working on it.  The movie, after all, follows that brilliant Aristotelian three act structure--beginning, middle, and end.  The theme is usually discernable.  You throw away the remnants of your popcorn.  But in real life, the end, remember, is death.  Like in a box or sprinkled over the sea, or heaven or hell, or whatever your belief system, so what are we rushing toward? We don't know the particulars of our particular end, but we know there is one, end of story. 

Assessing the freshness of now, start any story we have the time, energy, and passion for.  Like, for instance, we have a brand new shiny mayor, Mike Rawlings, who promises to make public education a priority. Today I look to that, I vote on that, to hopefully begin to put an uplifting end to this young generation's  story.  Tomorrow, hey, who knows?  


What do you think, dear readers?  I would love to know.

STS Statewide Conference, July 15th & 16: get involved in 2012 primary and election either to support existing pro-education candidates or to help find new candidates to replace current legislators who have failed in their responsibilities.

This is a cut and paste from an email received from savetxschools.com.
CHECK OUT THEIR WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION; THEY ALSO HAVE A FACEBOOK PAGE.


Save Texas Schools Statewide Conference in July!

Join hundreds of other concerned Texans at the STS Statewide Conference on Friday evening, July 15 and all day on Saturday, July 16 in Austin!

Did you know that some groups are already planning who will run in the primary elections next spring? That others are already active in finding even more candidates who believe that the cuts to education in this session didn't go deep enough? That recent polling shows that worries about education have moved to the top of list for Texans?

If we are going to take back Texas, we need to begin now! The failure of the current legislature was determined by the election last November. Let's get behind those who are pro-education and will keep their word to stand up for our children and schools!

The STS July conference will equip you with tools to get involved in the 2012 primary and election wherever you live, either to support existing pro-education candidates or to help find new candidates to replace current legislators who have failed in their responsibilities. We'll have morning and afternoon breakout sessions by region to meet with experts about strategizing to be successful in your area. We'll also learn how to mobilize our neighbors to vote and explain to them in simple terms that Texas can fund quality education for all.

Click here to register now! Space is limited. Cost is $30 each, including a light breakfast and lunch on Saturday. We're also negotiating to get reduced rates for hotels. Scholarships are available to teachers or staff who have lost jobs due to the cuts.

Look soon for our list of speakers and complete agenda!

Our Mission

Save Texas Schools is a nonpartisan coalition, focused on education. Just as the Tea Party has made its mandate cutting government (including education) to the bone, our mandate will be to provide efficient and effective education to ALL children, no matter what their situation. If we are to have a state that works together, rather than a state of haves and have nots, we MUST make sure that ALL students are given the opportunity to succeed. Texas is currently tied for 3rd in having the highest percentage of children living in poverty. For a state blessed with incredible resources, both in land and people, we have no excuses. Let's elect a legislature that has a vision for a better future than walled neighborhoods and minimum wage jobs (Texas also leads the nation in the percentage of workers who work for minimum wage).

We won't get fooled again! Knowing that the 2013 session will start with another huge deficit, let's start now to elect a legislature with the courage and vision to invest in the future of all Texans!

She crawls!!!!!!

It actually took place Saturday and I'm just now getting around to blogging it, yet MAKE NO MISTAKE: that is not because I wasn't floored (no pun intended).  She is the girl who crawled (shout out to you Harry Potter fans).
I was gone all day Saturday at PupFest, an amazing joint venture put on by Kitchen Dog Theater and Junior Players wherein student playwrights are given directors, actors, rehearsal space, and ultimately an audience after a week of rehearsals which culminates in a reading of their plays.  I was a playwright mentor, which I've been for several years now, assigned to three playwrights to help cull the best version of their project, which sometimes means adding and sometimes means cutting and occasionally means crying, but is almost always by end satisfying.  This year was no exception.  
But I wasn't home, and Brad had the kids.  During an afternoon visit to his mother's assisted living building, apparently while no one was doing much of anything, the girl was scooting her bottom across the soft carpet, and this movement somehow morphed into a crawl.  Which doesn't sound miraculous unless you've read previous posts about our developmental delay diagnosis and subsequent baby calisthenics and a certain torturous purple exercise ball, the vision of which frequently reduces my daughter and I to snot and tears.  Because many days, as we attempt the seemingly interminable exercises and Isabel looks at me like she wants to bite me, and I wonder in my head and even aloud if there is ANY POINT to this, it turns out that it was probably actually doing more than just making both of us crazy.
I did not find out about the day's milestone right when I got home--apparently because Brad didn't want to jinx it by making too big a deal out of it (what if Isabel doesn't crawl awhile, I can hear his sturdy brain churning rationally, and my wife punishes me for the next two weeks for being the first to see?)--but later that night, Brad called me into the bedroom. Isabel had scooted to the doorway and apparently had another irresistible urge to situate herself on all fours and crawl several steps toward me, beaming. I dropped to the floor and picked her up, and yes, schmuck that I am, I was crying. She was so freaking proud of herself, her smile literally taking up all of her face.  See, ye of little faith? her sea green eyes seemed to question.  Give me a minute. I was getting to it.
She's on her own timetable.  She thumbs her button nose at babycenter.com, drools liberally on your average fourteen-month-old baby.  Because she is uniquely wonderfully terrifyingly her, not content to fit into whatever box might make it easier, and while she can't yet speak, she's telling me loud and clear she knows it, she feels pretty damn good about it actually, and by the way mom, maybe you should put your big girl pants on. This is only the beginning.

Amazing Article from smart mom in Houston! Go Sue!!!!

This letter is, as far as I can tell, pretty damn close to perfect.


Choosing to shortchange our kids
Children will pay for cuts to education
By SUE DEIGAARD MOTHER of TWO

Last week I traveled to the state Capitol in Austin to testify before the House Appropriations
Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. The clerk in the House committee initially did not accept my form because in the box that asked for my title I simply wrote, "Parent in Houston ISD." Which makes me wonder, since when do people in America need a title to make their voices heard in their government? So I added to my title, "Taxpayer and Voter.
The message I delivered to the committee members was simple.
I reminded them that the cuts they are proposing to public education in Texas are a choice.The Legislature may have reached a consensus to cut "only" $4 billion from public education and think that we will consider it a gift that they did not cut the $10 billion that was originally proposed. But it's not a gift.
They are still cutting per-pupil spending by not providing money to fund expected growth in student population. This will have a direct and noticeable impact on children in the classroom. Every time we remove an educational opportunity from a child's environment, it sends the message that that opportunity is not valuable. The decisions our legislators are making will permanently alter how public education will be funded. Those decisions will affect the education of a generation of Texas children, which will have political and economic repercussions that will last for years to come.For one thing, education is the foundation of democracy. And it is a statistical fact that those without an adequate education are more likely to be incarcerated, are more likely to be unemployed and are more likely to draw on social services funded by tax dollars. All of these things cost taxpayers money,and even for those who might choose private school or home schooling for their children, the cost of inadequately educating Texas children will cost all of our children as taxpayers when they grow up.
Our legislators have a choice.
A popular talking point among many members of this Legislature is, "Just like a household, the state needs to live within its means." I don't know about you, but if I had to cut my discretionary spending to the point that I was compromising the education and well-being of my children, I would get a second job to bring more revenue into my home. And I certainly wouldn't cut essential things to my children while money sat in my savings account. Our state officials can make the same choices. They can use our state's savings account, the self-replenishing rainy day fund, but they choose not to. They can generate more revenue in a way that isn't a burden on property owners, such as closing corporate loopholes or fixing the business margins tax, but they choose not to. They claim this budget is balanced, but it's not. A balanced budget would not just cut nonessential services and programs. It would also use available savings and increased revenue to continue to maintain essential services and programs such as public education. We aren't asking anything from our state Legislature that we wouldn't choose to do for our own families.
I have met with several legislators this spring. I find it disingenuous for those legislators who say their voters don't want their taxes raised in the very same conversation recommend that local school districts raise their taxes. What that says to me is that they feel the solution is more revenue. If that is the case, then it is incumbent on our Legislature to raise that revenue in a holistic way that doesn't continue to overburden property owners, and not in a way that is most convenient for their political careers. Our kids need to be put before politics.  Make no mistake about it, our legislators have a choice and they are making the choice to cut funding from our children's classrooms.

Deigaard is a parent of two daughters who attend elementary school in the Houston Independent School District.

LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!!!!

So this is Jack's last day of first grade.  Or as he put it this morning, "I'm 99.9% second- grader already."  Dropping him off with his gifts for his teacher (yes, the boy wrote her a poem) and principal (after realizing how hard a poem was, he went for a more straightforward letter, but it was gorgeous and tear-provoking and contained the word "magical", or "magicil" as he spelled it, but I've never been one for editing my children).  We will miss Hexter Elementary.  I have adored so many people.  I pray we are making the best decision.  As for Isabel, well I think this picture says it all: the girl reminds me daily a.) just how much drool there really is in the world, and b.) what joy looks like.  Guess life continues on whether the milestone chart says you're up to date or not.  Hmm.

Now we charge into the unknown summer, certain to be filled with sweat, tears, and yes possibly a little blood.  I wouldn't have it any other way.

Read it and weep: Parental Paradox.

I want to admit upfront that this INCREDIBLY LONG POST which has taken me FOREVER to finish does meander a bit.  That said, if you stick with it, there is actually a unifying thread.  (If you don't get it, hey, that's your problem.)  Secondly, I did put up two posts a week or two ago, about an education rally, but something random with Blogger deleted it and by the time I figured it out, the rally had already happened.  I am NOT being defensive, why would you even say that?)

So the people from ECI (Early Childhood Intervention) came.  It's official, not just acute paranoia: my sweet baby daughter has a developmental delay.  They assessed her in five different areas; she qualified as "delayed" in physical development (delay, in this context, means she is three months behind).  Cognitively, even though she's not mimicking back "ba" when I enthusiastically shriek "BALL!", the girl is certainly babbling, testing how loud her pipes get (where does she GET that?), practicing varied pitch and intonation, known amongst those in the baby know as "pre-talk".  This suggests she gets what is going on even if she cannot yet put a name to it.  As my pediatrician aptly noted, "It appears the lights are on and someone is home." But physically, instead of having the motor skills/strength/coordination of a 13-month-old (she has yet to crawl or pull up on things, but does stand with help and take steps) my sweetheart is closer to a nine or ten-month-old baby.  

So big deal, right?  You know, depends on the day.   I'm trying to figure whether I should be spazzing out, because sometimes I am.  Some mornings, admittedly before coffee, I stare at her chubby little appendages and will them to harden.   But on the other hand, some days, I enjoy my latte, and it's one of those life things--not what you'd choose, but certainly deal-able in the scheme of things.

For the last couple of weeks, we have been visited by an affable occupational therapist who comes for an hour in the morning on Tuesdays.  We learn exercises.  I have been taught to compress Isabel's little joints at her shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles (something akin to the song, in my mind, at least, to: "Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes, Knees & Toes!").  The therapist suggested also the purchase of little white baby shoes from Stride Rite--those shoes that people used to bronze??  do they still do that?--for a ridiculous $45 dollars.  But they are painfully cute and do seem to ground her.  And then there is the other prop: an enormous purple exercise ball that Isabel is supposed to balance on.  The only problem being, my baby HATES.  THAT.  PURPLE.  BALL.  WITH.  A.  PASSION.  She weeps just to look at it. I can't blame her.

She seems so vulnerable propped up there, while I, ironically, her mother and supposed protector, attempt to knock her off balance, rolling back and forth, side to side, front and back.  She is supposed to have a reflex--apparently some of us are born with it but some of us aren't--the innate ability to self-protect.  As you hurtle towards the ground, this mechanism fires, something in your body tells your brain to put your hands out to break the fall and soften the blow.  You know the feeling.  

Only Isabel doesn't have this built in, so when she falls, she falls, face plants, hits, hurts.  So the drill is to toughen her up to the rough and tumble world, the hard cold ground.  Like some baby version of cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure is key.  You've seen it on Oprah or the Discovery Channel: Carl is convinced the potassium in bananas will kill him, so they coax Paul into eating seventeen bananas, upon which he hopefully notices he's still breathing.  He does the banana thing for a week or however long it takes to blaze a new more healthfully realistic neural pathway.  

With Izzy, we put her as close to the concept of gravity, the idea she will fall, as often and as many times as possible.  We do this to normalize the notion of danger, all the while being on soft carpet atop the purple orb, with me at the ready to catch her should she fall.  Until she's so strong she won't fall nearly as often or hard, and better, she won't be afraid.  Only catch is, I have to get out of her way.  The parental paradox.

Yes, I get it: the more we are put in the element that terrifies us, the stronger we become.  It's the theme of Rocky, for God's sakes, get yourself back in the ring after having the crap beat out of you.  I had a childhood crush on Sylvester Stallone and secretly wanted him to stand outside my suburban home in the middle of the night and bellow, "Errrriiiiinnnnn!"  But this 'stand on your own two feet' theme happens to be the definition of irony for a parent.  It's the quintessential question with no clear answer, or rather lots of answers in various shades of gray.  Forget black and white.  It's never that easy.  As long as they are your kid, you are confronted, daily, with the conundrum: when do you intervene, when do you save them by bringing their cleats to practice or securing that alarmingly small piece of Lego or "helping" with their homework, and when do you hold back and let them fail because natural consequences are the most brutal and therefore effective way to learn?  

The enormous dupe in having kids is that this "instinct" will suddenly kick in from all the progesterone poisoning and you'll naturally intuit what to do.  [SIDEBAR:  It's supposedly instinctual, for example, to breastfeed.  The LaLeche League makes certain you are aware of the many and varied benefits behind their stepford smiles on shiny pamphlets before you are allowed to leave the hospital, and if you don't feed your vulnerable new infant ANTIBODY RICH PERFECTLY MADE BY GOD MILK, even if your nipples bleed or you are literally going crazy, you will scar your as of now perfect child for life.  (Saved for another post, gotcha).]  But what strikes me is the antithesis--how often my impulse is the exact wrong thing to do.  

When I see my kid hurting, I am not driven to stand back but to bolt in, knock down the stupid kid who tried to cut in line and wrestle back my son's baggie of Teddy Grahams.  Then perhaps a long wimpy cuddle for my bawling progeny clutched to my useless chest.  To me, in the moment, that is what feels just, what feels "right", my instinct to protect him against pain.  But it's a whole different ball of wax, isn't it--what feels good in the moment and what actually stands the test of time as ultimately being good.  What's best in the long run is often what in the moment feels the worst.  Consider exercising, becoming good at anything.  It's takes time.  It's painful.  

But we learn to delay gratification, understanding that working now will pay later.  Essentially, this is why we all, or at least a large percentage of us, are not heroin addicts. We have to get up and go to work the next day.  Who's going to cook dinner? Sure, it must feel euphoric, but it's temporary; not a winsome risk/reward value.  I was not born with this wisdom: I wanted only to eat peanut butter, to watch Speed Racer.   Actually, that was not a problem with my parents, focused as they were on destroying their marriage; hence my love of sugar and issues with authority.  I had to learn it the hard way.  (Natural consequences are so much crueler, uglier in your twenties.)

So as parent, yet another part of the job is to teach them that even though they want what they want when they want it SUPER BAD, like NOW, (and you get it, you really do), in the long run, they really don't.  But being present-tense creatures, they are not thinking about some day in the future, they are in now, which is part of what makes children so breathtaking.   It's complicated.  So I've created my own undisciplined little system: when making parental decisions, I find a good rule of thumb is to note what I want to do and do the opposite. 

For example, part of my instinct is to hold Isabel tight and keep her my baby forever. There is something so endearing about her, so fresh from heaven or angels or God or the universe that she has not been adequately bruised yet by life to sense she should put her arm out.  That kind of trust, fragility, I can't help it, part of me finds it beautiful.  Remember who you were, who you could be, before someone broke your heart?  How ridiculously bold you were?  It is brilliant precisely because it is improbable, fleeting, because it will go away.  Part of me hates that stupid purple ball right along with her.  While knowing it is necessary.  While being grateful her delay is something we can work on, something she can most likely grow through, so that when she is three next to another three-year-old, there will likely be no appreciable difference.  Other than the fact that she might not be an Olympic athlete.  It's probably just fine.  She's going to have to face her purple ball whether she wants to or not: her own Apollo Creed.  Ultimately it's good for her.  Something she won't even remember.  Something I always will.  

Because for a  a blink our babies are perfect, the possibilities are endless, and then they aren't.  Some limits set, traits show their stripes, and our babies are no longer just babies--a special limbo state, in my opinion, hovering near perfection--but little people.  And like all people, big and small, they are full of flaws, some subtle, some terrifying.  Some luck of the genetic draw and the way life greets who it turns out, I believe, they already were.  Mysteries slowly unfolding while we bear witness, some clear from the beginning, which you can only see in hindsight.  My son's low frustration tolerance (no doubt handed down from me, reinforced by his silent study of my bad attitude in traffic) and ability to create amusing rhymes. 

And it's not like this goes away when Isabel learns to walk and talk and sing too loud and possibly off-key on very long road trips.  It continues past toddler hood to kid-dom and beyond, maybe scarier because the bigger they grow, out and away, the higher the stakes are.  But then these vulnerable children are also unbelievably resilient and have lovely ways of reminding you.  In this way you are not a constant nervous wreck, because just when you think they're toast, they do something to amaze you.  If you let them.

Jack had his friend over to play after school.  After they had exhausted Legos, Pokemon, castle guys, and Nintendo, Jack's friend suggested, "Why don't we watch a show?"  Jack kept ignoring him (yanking the head off a Lego figure and attaching it to various bodies can be singularly absorbing).  So his friend kept repeating himself periodically, like maybe Jack really had been so engrossed that he hadn't heard him.  "Let's watch a show," his friend suggested more and more vigorously.  I fought the urge to jump in with "Jack, stop being a pill and turn on the TV." I held back, waiting to see what they would do.  "Jack," his fed up pal said finally, "I WANT TO WATCH A SHOW."  My son finally acknowledged him with this: "I hate shows," before continuing with his work.   "But it's the same as XBox," his friend pointed out reasonably, "you just don't have to move your fingers."  

Jack didn't argue with this sound logic but still wasn't buying it.  "Let's go outside," he offered, abandoning his Legos, so out through the kitchen they went. A few minutes later, busy with the baby, sopping juice from her chin, I heard  "ummphhff!" from Jack's friend outside the window.  Just as I turned to run outside and wield a new-fangled parental technique found in Parents, Jack said this:  "Now we've both hurt each other.  I think we're equal."   Which seemed to make sense to both of them.  I stopped in my tracks. They switched to something else, baseball maybe, laughed, screeched, and continued to have fun.  I admired them from my spot as resident adult in the kitchen.  They had glided through a potential obstacle to their friendship effortlessly without even realizing it.  They made it seem so simple.

So I've been considering this as a life philosophy for grownups, a no holds barred adherence to the Golden Rule.  It has it's validity.  If Rick Perry were in fourth grade, for instance, at a Texas public school, he would find using a portion of the Rainy Day Fund a no brainer.  Being that the Texas Constitution states every kid has a right to an "adequate" education, the structural deficit we have been facing (or not facing) would be acknowledged and attacked systematically.  He would be compelled to stir the pot in a different direction.  Using "I won't raise taxes EVER!"as a campaign slogan and placing the deficit on the backs of teachers to the detriment of kids wouldn't happen.  Because he would be that kid he is hurting.  He would be forced to feel it by living it, and I believe that is all it would take to make him do it different.  I feel certain somewhere in there is a decent man who happens to have a really nice head of hair.  

But we grow up and forget.  Or our own priorities get in the way.  We have fallen and hurt ourselves too many times, had to put ourselves back together.  Humpty Dumpty is a cautionary tale, a prophecy.  We know to stretch out our arms, to protect ourselves first.  We don't mean to be selfish.  It's natural, isn't it, to think of your own before other people's children?  But if we didn't--if for some reason we ripped that very human quality out of the collective gene pool, did away with it--would we be better for it?  Or would that instinct be the end of us?  I honestly don't know.

Alas, after much consideration, my husband and I have decided not to send our son back to his public elementary school next year.  This has been a terribly difficult decision, one I have lost sleep over, one my son is actually angry with us for.  He loves his school and doesn't want to leave his friends.  But what can I tell him but what we've told ourselves?  We would be part of the public school solution for as long as we felt sure he would get a solid education.  We were taking it year by year.  We were prepared to see how things progressed with the district and budget cuts, particularly with the magnets, which we thought we would pursue in 4th grade.  

But here we are, at the almost end of the year, and still a real number eludes us.  We don't know if the cap for K-4 is going to raise to 25, we don't know how adversely the magnets will be affected, we don't feel certain about the future of DISD, and apparently, as of last night, we do not have a Superintendent.  My husband and I just aren't sure.  And that's not good enough. This has nothing to do with how wonderful our experience with our neighborhood school has been--particularly the amazingly involved teacher/parent community.  This has everything to do with the very slloowwwlly moving political machine.  We can't know what effects a drastic budget cut would create, so we at least have to consider possible scenarios.  The stakes are high.

I've been asking myself if this decision is hypocritical.  I wonder if that is what people from school will think. For the past five months, I have attended school board meetings and the rally in Austin, called and written my representatives, been interviewed by Channel 11 as part of the "grassroots movement" in East Dallas. I've written SAVE TEXAS EDUCATION!! on my car windows and wheeled around town noting everything from a thumbs up to a middle finger.  It is in no small part why I picked up this blog again.  I have done these things, of course, for my son, but also for his friends and his teachers and kids across Texas.  Because I believe it is right, incumbent upon us all to take action.  If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem.  Right?  Sort of.  Another shade of gray.  Representative Sheets and Dr. Hinojosa have both said, "This is the new reality."  I don't see this ending after this biennium.  I think this fight is going to be around for awhile and could get worse before it gets better.  

There are only so many hours in a day.  My kid gets one chance to go to second grade.   So we dissected our instinct to "save" our kid, considered alternatives, and made what we think is the safer bet.  Could he end up being stronger, better, for having stayed in the public system?  Was watching his mother fight for his school and his teachers just as important as a reasonable class size? Maybe.  The truth is, we can't be 100% sure until we are there.  What we do know is this decision gives us some certainty: smaller classes, less standardized testing,  less bureaucracy.  Though I believe my son would be fine were he to stay in his current school, stepping in to ensure some control feels appropriate.  It also feels awful, like I am stepping away from being part of the public school "solution".  But I eventually return to where I was in the first place.  This is my son; he trumps philosophy.  I reflexively put my arm out.  Was I born with this instinct or did I have to learn it?  Is this like the oxygen mask?  You've got to put on your own before you can help anyone else?  Is it necessary for survival?

I have so many more questions than answers.  This is what it is to be a parent.  You go with what you know to be true for you and for your family at the time and you pray more often than not you will make an at least acceptable decision.

I am not finished with my role of accidental activist.  I can and intend to continue to be an advocate for reform in public education regardless of where my son goes to school.  I write this down because I want to be held accountable.  Don't hesitate to ask.  Because when education becomes a privilege and not a right,  I believe the very real and not too distant future of us all stands in question.